Django, Southside

Movie theater, South Side of Chicago: photo by Russell Lee, April 1941, from this site.

So there’s been some discussion in comments on various bits of our Django Unchained roundtable about how African-American audiences have reacted to the film.

The obvious answer to this question is, of course, that different black folks have reacted differently to the film, just as different white folks have reacted differently to it. There’s no monolithic black community response any more than there’s a monolithic white community response.

With that said…I did see Django Unchained on the south side of Chicago, with an audience that was basically entirely black (I think I may have glimpsed one other white guy there, but that was pretty much it.) The reaction to the film was, as far as I could tell, pretty enthusiastic; the little old lady sitting next to me kept loudly finishing punch lines and seemed particularly stoked by Stephen’s ignominious end.

When I was leaving the theater, I did overhear an interesting conversation, in which two men were discussing the way that “we undermine ourselves,” (to quote loosely.) I assumed they were referring to the character of Stephen — the black slave who aids his white master and effectively becomes (as Charles Reece points out) the film’s main antagonist. The idea that blacks are at least partially responsible for their own oppression is a well-established discourse in the black community, of course, from Bill Cosby and Barack Obama on down.

Still, it made me a little queasy to hear it deployed in this context, inasmuch as Stephen really is not, as far as I could tell, an accurate representation of anything. Uncle Tom really is a caricature, and looking to Stephen for straightforward lessons on slavery or racial politics really seems like a bad idea.

Anyway…while writing this, I actually started to wonder how white audiences reacted to the film. So, anybody see the film with a primarily white audience? Was there discomfort? Enthusiasm? Or what?

One screening I saw was almost entirely white with the exception of Elvis Mitchell, who interviewed Tarantino afterwards. That was an industry screening, so it’s going to tilt favorable to balls-licking sycophantic. I then saw it with a regular audience of mostly white people who also applauded and laughed at every part that Tarantino wanted them to. I sensed no discomfort.

On the other hand, at Lincoln, a lady screamed out that the movie is a lie, that Lincoln would never have used curse words. She said the film was despicable! Another guy told her to shut the fuck up and then a usher made her shut the fuck up … at least till the end credits when she started yelling Spielberg was scum for such a depiction. She was white, but so was everyone else in the theater, as best I can recall.

Yeah…I don’t know about that essay, Isaac. She seems to be presenting herself as speaking for black people generally in a way that seems pretty dicey. She walks up to the idea that black people don’t have revenge fantasies, which strikes me as extremely dubious, and she comes even closer to saying that black people don’t want to hear the n-word in their entertainment, which the last several decades of popular music seems to refute pretty thoroughly.

I agree with this though:

Samuel L. Jackson makes a deeply disturbing turn as Stephen, an irascible right hand to Calvin Candie—part butler, part household overseer, part world’s crankiest hype man to his master. We’re supposed to hate Stephen because he’s about as bad as the white people (and Jackson plays the role so convincingly that we do, indeed, come to hate Stephen). There’s no sign, however, of why Stephen became so cruel; no acknowledgment that he was cruel to survive and that slaves only had impossible choices, when they had choices at all. We should feel as sympathetic toward Stephen as we do toward Django or Broomhilda, or any of the other enslaved people in the movie. Unfortunately, Tarantino is too heavy handed and self-indulgent to allow us even this.

If our efforts during the past 40 years towards racial equality were successful, why should a contemporary black person feel any different about the film than a contemporary white person?

We have a black president who was also re-elected, for Pete’s sake.

If Tarantino’s ultimate goal with “Django” was to increase racial division rather than lessen it, then screw him. He’s part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I treat everyone the same, regardless of race, and have for all of my adult life. For anyone else — regardless of their race or cultural background — who claims to be for equality, I’d expect them to do the same.

Mixed audience mostly in their mid-twenties for me. I’d say there were more brown people (South Asians, Hispanics) than anything else. Or maybe it was 1/3 black, 1/3 white and 1/3 brown. Lots of couples. It was a rowdy theater, Stephen got the biggest laugh, everyone cheered at the end. Coming out of the theater I thought the black couples looked maybe a bit more troubled, but that could have been my imagination.

“and she comes even closer to saying that black people don’t want to hear the n-word in their entertainment, which the last several decades of popular music seems to refute pretty thoroughly.”

You’re making it sound like all “black people” are comfortable with that type of rap music. I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. There’s also distinctions to be made between entertainment made by black people and something like “Django.” Like Roxane said:

“What struck me most, sitting there in that theatre, was how Django Unchained was a white man’s slavery revenge fantasy, and one in which white people figure heavily and where black people are, largely, incidental.”

I haven’t seen the movie, but I just listened to Tarantino’s latest interview with Terry Gross. At one point, she asked him whether events like the Sandy Hook massacre ever put a temporary damper on his enjoyment of movie violence, and he got really pissy, retorting, “I find that question very disrespectful to the victims!” Does that make any sense at all to anyone? I really don’t think the guy is all that smart.

Steven, there are definitely some black people who are very uncomfortable with the word. But there are lots and lots of black people who listen to rap music. I just don’t think an argument that that word in entertainment is offensive to black people holds up without substantial qualifications.

If she wanted to explain why it’s different when it’s in hip hop, that’s fine. She didn’t do that though.

Just to be clear, I’m not weighing in here on whether Tarantino should or should not have used the word. I’m just saying that you need to make an argument that’s more complicated than, “black people find this offensive,” because there’s a lot of evidence that, while some of them might, some of them don’t. Certainly the folks I watched the film with, including the little old lady sitting next to me, did not seem particularly shocked or upset.

To get to the merits of it…you could argue that Tarantino can’t write it, I guess, because he’s white. But many of the people in the film saying the word are black. So do they not have any agency? Is it okay when they say it, but not when the white people do…even though the whites who say it are clearly labeled as racist? I just feel like her take on it dodges most of the relevant issues.

I have to say, I don’t really find Tarantino’s “that’s how they would have talked” defense all that effective, either. As the review Isaac links points out, the film isn’t obsessed with realism in other matters. And further more…I don’t even know if it’s true that it was current slang at the time, necessarily.

Yes, the movie is such an incredible ordeal for some Sensitive Souls, they can brag to have actually lived through the experience!

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Certain movies are difficult for me to watch in the vicinity of white people—
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Are they mocking, assaulting the Sensitive Soul? No, she assumes they’re being racist, clueless, reacting inappropriately. I.e., if they’re laughing at a scene in “Django,” it must be because they’re racist; any other possibility is not taken into account.

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Given how fraught black history has been, it’s hard to look at the ancestors of those who made that history, sitting quietly alongside them in a theater, watching a depiction of the injustices of the past.
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Funny how the Sensitive Soul assumes every single white person there was a descendant of slave-owners, KKK creeps. Couldn’t their ancestors might have been abolitionists, or fought for the North? Or from a European country that never had slavery? If it were a white person assuming the worst about a group of blacks, that would be attacked as “racism.”

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Attending a screening of The Help, I sensed a gleeful nostalgia in the air as if all the elderly white folks around me couldn’t help but think, “Those were the days.” The people around me applauded as the movie began and while it ended. They were visibly moved.
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Do we see a pattern here? Again, the Sensitive Soul assumes the white audience enjoyed “The Help” because they liked how it showed blacks being “in their place,” subservient. “Soul On Ice” it’s not, but that movie was actually no “Gone With The Wind”-type whitewashing of America’s racist past:

“Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan…is a journalist who decides to write a book from the point of view of the maids (referred to as ‘the help’), exposing the racism they are faced with as they work for white families.” (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Help_%28film%29 ; emphasis added.)

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I started becoming paranoid—were the [white people] people around me gleeful because they could enjoy hearing the N-word used without consequence, or were they, like moviegoers during The Help, longing for a different time?
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The Sensitive Soul wonders: are they gleeful because they’re racist, or gleeful because…they’re racist? (Again, it’s not racist if it’s a black person thinking that way. And if you have trouble with that argument: you’re racist!)

That the audience might have laughed for different, non-racist reasons, like the absurdity of a “house black” having such loathing for a free black, seems not to have occurred.

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To be clear, any offense I take with Django Unchained is not borne of political correction.
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No, Political Correctness has nothing to do with it…because she says so.

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My offense is personal—rising from the uncomfortable reality that had I been born in a different time and place, I could have been a slave.
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Well, whoop-de-do. So could any of us; do you think blacks were the only race ever enslaved? For that matter, had I been born in a different time and place, I could have been a pile of ashes in a Nazi crematorium. (Note to self: throw hissy fit over “Inglorious Basterds.”)

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I hate the N-word, and avoid using it at all costs because the N-word has always been a pejorative, designed to remind black people of their place; a word to reinforce a perception of inferiority. There is no reclamation to be had.
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I heartily agree. So, what does it mean when blacks delight in using the “N-word” about each other?

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There are 110 instances of the N-word in nearly three hours, something Tarantino seems to believe is historically accurate and therefore justified…When Tarantino suggests he is trying to achieve verisimilitude by infusing his script with the N-word, I cannot but feel he is being selective about how and where he chooses to honor historical accuracy.
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Oh, has Tarantino claimed to be making a documentary? In the invented “Mandingo fighting,” he was clearly making a nod to the earlier “slaveryxploitation” movie and book of that name. He could have meant blacks being called the “N-word” was normal usage in that time, then proceeded to stylize and exaggerate, as is his wont.

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Certainly, the N-word is part of our history as much as it is part of our present… it has appeared in nearly every aspect of American life from legal documents to music and movies to our vernacular. And still, Roots manages to depict the realities of slavery without using the N-word once and it’s nearly ten hours long.
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Does that then mean that “Roots” is ahistorical, unrealistic? No? Ah, it just doesn’t offend Sensitive Souls. (As it turns out, a respondent said, “…When is the last time you watched Roots? Just watched the whole series during the holidays, and the ‘N’ word was used a lot. Maybe you watched an edited version.”)

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But Django isn’t really a movie about slavery but a spaghetti Western set during the 1800s. Slavery is the movie’s easily exploited backdrop. As with Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino found a traumatic cultural experience of a marginalized people, and used it.
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That’s exactly right; Tarantino ran it through his exploitation-loving sensibility.

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When [Django] gets to choose his own outfit (thanks, Massa), he picks a bright blue fop of a suit, that makes the audience laugh at the simple negro.
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Could not the laughter have been caused by his choosing a gaudy, showy, rather than sombrely serious outfit? Ah, but I forgot this was a white audience; of course the only reason for their reaction has to be…racism.

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We’re supposed to hate Stephen because he’s about as bad as the white people (and Jackson plays the role so convincingly that we do, indeed, come to hate Stephen). There’s no sign, however, of why Stephen became so cruel; no acknowledgment that he was cruel to survive and that slaves only had impossible choices, when they had choices at all.
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Uh, does a modern audience need to have it explained to them “that slaves only had impossible choices, when they had choices at all”?

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We should feel as sympathetic toward Stephen as we do toward Django or Broomhilda, or any of the other enslaved people in the movie.
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So if an abused person embraces their victimizer, manipulates themselves into a position of relative power in a vicious system, becomes a gleeful abuser of those who should be his comrades, we’re supposed to be every bit as sympathetic toward him as with others who were simply victimized, and did not join in the oppression? Alas, a Sensitive Soul I’m not…

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What struck me most, sitting there in that theatre, was how Django Unchained was a white man’s slavery revenge fantasy, and one in which white people figure heavily and where black people are, largely, incidental.
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“Largely” incidental except for the hero of the movie that is named after him; the woman whose freedom drives his quest; the second-biggest villain.

And, someone is complaining because in a movie about slavery in the Old South, “white people figure heavily”? I seem to recall Caucasians were more than, largely, incidental to the whole process…

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There is no collective slavery revenge fantasy among black people but I am certain, if there were one, it would not be about white people, not at all.
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Nah; why should there be any resentment? Why, look at black fantasy in all the media: it’s never about macho violence, there are no racist whites targeted in Blaxploitation movies. It’s all about “a long vacation in Paris,” educational achievement. As rapper Magna Cum Laude sings,”My GED score is bigger than yours!”

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My slavery revenge fantasy…would involve the reclamation of dignity on my own terms and not with the “generous” assistance of benevolent white people who were equally complicit in the ills of slavery.
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Abolitionists, Lincoln, and soldiers of the North, keep out! You have no business getting involved in ending slavery. Even if you lost your lives in the struggle, you will be sneeringly condemned for your ” ‘generous’ assistance”; be seen as “equally complicit in the ills of slavery,” every bit as guilty as any slavemonger.

Regarding the Sandy Hook massacre, I’m guessing that Tarantino meant it’s disrespectful of the victims to cheapen their real-life horror by reducing it to a discussion about violence in pop entertainment. It’s kind of stupid to suggest a filmmaker shouldn’t make a film because it has fictional violence in after a bunch of kids were killed by a nutjob. I’d get kind of sick of having people ask me that, too. Hell, I’m sick of it now. I kind of like that Tarantino’s so dismissive of the question. More people should be.

I don’t think it’s insane to suggest that a fascination with violence in film might have some possible connection to the way we deal with violence in real life, or vice versa.

I mean, does it cheapen the victim’s horror to reduce it to a discussion of gun control? People make that argument too. Does Tarantino really care that much about the victims? Or is he just being a defensive prick? (And of course, just because he’s being a defensive prick doesn’t mean that Terri Gross isn’t awful as well.)

Noah — Borrowing the title of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1958 book, I think we have made an enormous “Stride Towards Freedom” regarding race relations in this country. I remember well how things were in the 1960s compared to how they are now, and there is no comparison. That doesn’t mean the US has no more strides to make, of course, but it has made enormous progress — especially compared to most other countries on the planet.

I’m all in favor of regulating the access to weapons. (I’m also in favor of regulating the financial systems.) This doesn’t mean that the media have no responsibility in how violence is perceived (mainly as having no consequences – as fun and entertaining – or as being a just retribution to chastise people who are perceived as bad guys).

On the one hand, I feel safer in a world where it’s not just cops and soldiers with guns. But would I feel safer in a world with no guns? Honestly, I kind of doubt it. A revolution was won, slavery was ended, Nazis were stopped, all with guns, but what if it had been with swords and knives? Maybe not. Thus, on the other hand, I’m likely a good deal safer with a state defense system that uses guns and WMDs. The “collateral” result of this kind of thinking is a lot dead people every year from gun violence. The pundits will continue to talk about media violence and the classic “few bad apples” (e.g., those people with mental problems), when this situation is more like a logical conclusion to the American character arc.

Noah, it’s not mere opinion, but should be based on the facts and reason. I don’t know about your high school experience, but the most violent kids in mine were almost always football players. Why not a moratorium on football after each of these shooting? Or pick something else at random …. I think it’s pretty goofy, simplistic and will never add up to anything. Some people feel better when they’re controlling what you do, and these killings allow them a voice for a brief time.

Football players weren’t especially violent in my school that I can remember. There are serious problems re: violence with football, though, if you’ve seen any of the recent discussions about head trauma.

Social science research is really dicey at the best of times. But from what I’ve seen, there’s little reason to think that there’s a causal link between violent entertainment and violent actions. That doesn’t exactly mean there’s no link though. If you think art has some relation to our lives, then talking about that link is valid. It’s simply not crazy to ask Tarantino what he thinks he’s doing with violence in his work. Does violence in the real world bother him? If so, why portray it as exciting and satisfying in fiction? There are various possible ways to answer that question, but censoring the question itself is just censorship. It’s defensive bullshit from people who don’t want their toys taken away from them and who like masquerading as daring aesthetes. The only time really I ever think it would be a good idea to get rid of violent media is when I hear free speech absolutists whining about how life is so unfair to them. It’s ridiculous.

The question of would the world be safer without guns is really an elaborate and ridiculous red herring. Nobody is going to make guns disappear. The question is whether we could get fewer atrocities with more regulation. The experience of places like Australia suggests strongly that we could. Certainly, it seems like moderate changes in line with most of the rest of Western world — more background checks, bans on certain kinds of weapons and ammo — would be warranted considering the frequency with which these massacres seem to occur.

And, again, if you really don’t think guns have anything to do with the results of violence (not violent impulses or even violent incidents, but the results of violence) then you should really have no problem with arming every single person in the US with a nuclear weapon. If, on the other hand, you think that would be a bad idea, then you maybe need to grapple with the fact that higher power weaponry is going to result in higher body counts.

Your interpretation: “if you really don’t think guns have anything to do with the results of violence”

Eh?

“Certainly, it seems like moderate changes in line with most of the rest of Western world — more background checks, bans on certain kinds of weapons and ammo — would be warranted considering the frequency with which these massacres seem to occur.”

I haven’t done a lot of investigating of this on my own, but it’s my understanding that most gun violence doesn’t involve assault rifles and the like, so completely ridding ourselves of anything resembling such weapons wouldn’t make much of a difference to the stats.

“It’s simply not crazy to ask Tarantino what he thinks he’s doing with violence in his work.”

This, I agree with. He’s said something interesting things on the different types of violence in his work. That’s not what he was bothered about, though. What’s nonsense is asking whether he should not release his films, because someone shot up some kids somewhere. That’s the kind of ping-pong media causation that’s a lot of garbage.

As I mentioned in my piece, I saw the movie with a predominantly white audience (from what I could tell; I didn’t actually pay too much attention), and there was at least one line that made me uncomfortable when people laughed (when Stephen says that they’ll need to burn the sheets that Django slept in), but as with so much of the movie, I think that discomfort is intended, and laughter is in no way an inappropriate reaction to it. Hell, the way Samuel L. Jackson delivers it, it’s a funny line! I really didn’t sense any audience reaction that would be considered troublesome; people reacted pretty much exactly as Tarantino intended them to, laughing at the funny lines, cheering at the satisfying moments of comeuppance, and so on. I don’t know if everyone came away from the experience with thoughts about the brutality of slavery or eyes opened about racism, but it seems like you’ve got to work to turn it into something offensive.

By the way, when it comes to Tarantino, I think he’s a brilliant, intelligent filmmaker, but in person he’s pretty insufferable. I try not to watch his talk show appearances, since he comes off as obnoxious and much less thoughtful than I think he actually is. I actually have an anecdote about meeting him that’s kind of amusing: it was at a film festival that he used to do in Austin, and the night that I attended, he showed this movie called Dark of the Sun, which featured Rod Taylor and James Brown as some mercenaries who went on a mission into Africa to rescue some people. It was a good movie, but the biggest crowd reaction came from the relationship between Taylor and Brown, which was kind of homoerotic, full of dreamy looks while they were thinking of each other, and a bit where Brown talked to Taylor’s love interest about how lucky she was to have such a great man. I approached Tarantino afterward in a bit of fannish enthusiasm, and wanting to have something to say to him other than “I’m a big fan!”, I asked him what he thought about the intent of the homoerotic relationship. His response was to say that he just thought the theater was full of “fucking assholes”, seeming kind of angry that the audience read that into what was an innocent bromance between such macho heroes. I thought that was kind of funny, and it makes a good story to tell people: I got yelled at by Quentin Tarantino!

Anyway, sorry to go so off topic there. No, I don’t think Django is racist, and based on my experience, audiences probably react to it “correctly”. That is all.

I think the assault weapons make it a lot easier to get large scale massacres, which it would be nice to put a stop to. I think background checks could help with the rest. It seems worth trying, in any case.

“That’s the kind of ping-pong media causation that’s a lot of garbage.”

I’d agree…but it’s also garbage for him to start whining about how it’s offensive to the victims, or whatever. He’s just doing the same thing Gross is in that case — using the fact that folks died somewhere to climb up on the moral high ground.

I thought Terry Gross basically kissed his ass throughout the interview, despite the section where he got really pissy. She wasn’t suggesting that media violence had anything to do with the massacre; she just wanted to know whether real-life violence ever put a damper on his love of movie violence.

It’s hard for me to put my finger on it, but the contrast between reactions to Tarantino-style movie violence and reactions to real-life violence does seem significant to me. For the most part, America cheers movies in which mass numbers of people die and especially loves the sadistic touches like gangsters “getting medieval on his ass,” i.e. torturing someone to death. Then terrorists kill 3,000 Americans and we’re all sobbing with collective self-pity (different from actual sympathy for the victims) and print up comic books where even Doctor Doom feels really bad about the whole thing. I think that points to something bad, whether it’s hypocrisy or just the shittiness of Tarantino’s work. If he thinks his movies have absolutely no connection to the real world, then what does that say about his movies? Admittedly, I’m very squeamish about movie violence and would love to see that as proof that I’m morally superious to people who aren’t, so that may have a lot to do with my reaction.

I enjoy a lot of violent movies…which may well make you morally superior to me!

Violence is obviously a pretty important part of the world and of how people interact with the world. As such, it makes sense that art will address it in various ways. I think, as you say, a lot of the problematic and often hypocritical ways we think about violence, or a lot of our confusions around violence, come out in art, where violence is both horrifying and exhilarating, both morally beyond the pale and the guarantor of, or even the basis of, ethical action.

Like I said, I don’t think it really works that people see a violent film, then go off and perform violent acts (I mean, nobody in the theater I was at got up and said, “I guess we need to kill white people!”, despite the cracked delusions of folks like Drudge.) People do think about these issues through art, though, and that can matter. I think 24 had an impact on debates about torture, for example (though not as much of one as the rhetoric of political elites.)

Tarantino sometimes works to make violence uncomfortable; much more so than you usually get in body count films. That’s not exactly the case in Django — though the decision to create a slavery revenge narrative obviously has political implications.

Matthew, I know that Tarantino really hates audiences feeling superior to old films, which is frequently the case at his own theater. Don’t know about the audience you saw it with, but here in Hollywood it can really get obnoxious trying to watch an old horror film with a bunch of snotty hipsters.

Also, Dark of the Sun has one amazing score from Jacques Loussier. Haven’t seen the movie, though.

Violence in the media is not the problem, the problem is how violence is shown as something enjoyable. It desensitizes people to the devastating effects of real violence. Also: it appears in a childishly simplistic good (they’re heroes) vs. bad (they deserve what’s coming to them) kind of way. I don’t know why, but this reminded me of something: is it America’s foreign politics, I wonder?

OK, I’ve thought about commenting on the topic of violence in the media and correlation with school shootings, but the subject makes me very twitchy, in part because I’m on the emergency planning committee for my location, so I get to write up the actual emergency plan for school shootings here, and the whole topic is really fucking fraught and makes my stomach hurt. Looking around our actual workplace, listing office furniture to hide behind, teaching employees how to use crisis alert phones, and trying to figure out actual exit routes from shooters is….grim. Anyway. But I thought I’d drop what I know.

So far as I’m aware, there’s not much correlation for entertainment violence and real world violence. It’s difficult to get controls, etc. However, there IS correlation of other kinds of ‘media violence’, that is, actually reporting of real events, especially suicide and school shootings. For research you want to look for the stuff on celebrity or other well-known person suicide, which is sometimes referred to as the Werther effect. Same appears to be true of school shootings for some cases. Which is why a lot of the successful prevention incidents are kept on the downlow, because the schools do not want this shit to spread (neither does actual law enforcement). So, my school has gone on high alert because of big news splash school shootings, as do some other schools. Humans are very imitative.

I’ll spare you my thoughts on the NRA (I’m sure you can guess). I’m very much a proponent of Aus/Euro style gun control, background checks, banning anything that can’t be used for hunting actualfax animals, etc., for obvious reasons. I probably won’t read the thread again, but for those who want to read the research, I would look into the Werther/suicide/mass shooting stuff–it’s around.

I think the difficulty of getting controls seems somewhat key. That is, it seems like there’s a fair bit of evidence that folks who watch particular violent media aren’t more likely to be violent than folks who don’t…but there’s really no way to know what the connection is between the prevalence of, say, particular revenge narratives and levels of violence in society.

Right, that’s my understanding too. I haven’t read the literature in a while, but the controls is the big stumbling block. Very difficult to get them. But so far as they can tell from what data they do have, there’s not evidence for entertainment to cause it.

I saw this in Harlem at one of the Magic Johnson theaters in an audience that was probably about 99% black and the people around me certainly seemed like they were eating it up. Lots of laughs, lots of audience participation. Lots of discomfort at the pain. I wasn’t privy to any of their discussions, but all the external signs were hugely positive.

I wrote this a bit back about links between violent media and violence. The study I talk about there basically argued that violent movies reduce violent crime because when young men are watching violent movies they aren’t drinking and/or committing violent crime.

I guess Tarantino could have told Gross that he had made the movie extra long in order to extend the amount of time that potentially violent young men would be out of circulation….

I think there’s something to the idea that depictions of violence can be kind of an outlet, a way to vicariously experience thrills without endangering yourself or others. Japan provides an interesting example: they produce some incredibly violent (and sexually explicit, for that matter) entertainment in the form of movies, comics, anime, etc., but their crime rates are miniscule compared to the U.S. I’ve long had the theory that characters’ emotions and reactions in manga or anime is a sort of release valve for Japanese people, who are expected to remain very reserved in public, but the same could be said for the sex and violence in their entertainment. Of course, the same isn’t necessarily true in the U.S., where we’re encouraged to express ourselves and suppress our prurient impulses, and while we do glorify violence, we’re pretty damn uptight about sex. We’re confused as all hell, but I think it’s better to get our rocks off by enjoying some faked depictions of violence than doing it ourselves.

I have problems with the way the infotainment mediasphere reports these events too. People doing the killings are immediate celebrities. In a culture that idolizes celebrities we know what the effect may be…

As far as mass shootings go, I think that it’s possible that the prevalence of assault weapons, the existence of a violent mass media, and a huge number of other factors could easily play into it. Let’s not give short shrift to the most complex structure on Earth here. If my stint in an evolutionary/developmental psychology lab taught me anything, it’s to be highly suspicious of any simple single-causal postulations about human motivation/action. The structure that we’re dealing with in the gun debate is so dynamic that I’m skeptical at times that we could even agree about the sort of criterion necessary to isolate the variables at stake. But! This is all we can really do. We can only refer to hard cases and empirical observations with something this sticky. And I promise you, they will be horribly inexact (as statistics/empirical aggregation at this level inexorably is). And as far as solutions, with something this scale and this complexity we can only apply a huge, messy, inaccurate statistical bandage with practically unforseeable consequences. If we stray too far from discussions that are really rooted in the complexity of human (and non-human!) causality, then we’re quickly dealing with a bunch of just-so stories that won’t really get us anywhere. I’m not a a quietist, here, but I really do think that any “responsible” solutions in will be horribly unsatisfying to most of the people involved in the debate.

…Dark of the Sun has one amazing score from Jacques Loussier. Haven’t seen the movie, though.
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It’s extremely well-done; I saw it a couple of times when it was first released. And just now coming out on DVD. Featuring the first “chainsaw as a weapon” filmic sequence I know of! Based on a novel by South African writer Wilbur A. Smith, it decries racism (one villain is an ex-Nazi), but is set during the Mau-Mau uprising (the mission is to rescue whites from these rampaging blacks, who fire off mortars while wearing tribal get-ups), and Jim Brown has a scene where he rejects going back to African tribal ways as climbing “back up into the trees [like a monkey].” (Quoted & described from memory; it’s amazing how much of this film I distinctly recall.)

And yes, the score was excellent; I loved the scene in the rail station as the train is preparing to leave for its mission.

Maybe Tarantino is one of those pop-culture artists whose work works on both a stupid level and a smart level, and I’m just unable to appreciate the smart level. For example, I’m a big Eminem fan, but I can understand why many people see him as a quasi-retarded douche who got rich by spewing hateful garbage to stupid kids–that’s at least one aspect of him. Johnny Ryan kind of fits into that category, too. Still, I left Inglorious Basterds feeling dirty and ashamed, so I should probably avoid Django.

I get what you mean, Charles, this is just cartoony violence. It’s harmless.

True enough, but violence is never harmless. I’m not saying that there’s a cause and effect between cartoony (or entertainment) violence and violent action. As I said above, that kind of violence desensitizes people and that’s bad enough…

Violence to me is such a big deal that I advocate a careful complex presentation of it. I’m not advocating censorship or anything, but I would never use it to entertain people. The media circus is not the Roman circus, but it is a circus nonetheless…

I don’t see fictional violence as desensitizing people to real violence. Mostly what “desensitizes” people is distance (physical and psychological). Americans were remarkably sensitive when violence hit New York, but not near as much when it occurs in other parts of the world. The people most seen as being cold to 9-11 were leftists and others who probably agree with you on a whole bunch of things, because of the way they tried to take a sort of dispassionate look on the roots of the event. Intellectualism desensitizes us, too … everything but (maybe) white hot passion is seen as causing desensitization by someone.

It’s as much of a formula as having a basic plot outline (RR escapes Coyote) with new contraptions added each time and slightly altered backgrounds. I’m not sure I’d call a classical performer a collaborator, even in the sense of an actor. The script doesn’t tend to have near as much direction as a score.

But…the background aren’t just slightly altered. Mozart is really quite different from Debussy is really different from John Cage.

And scores vary a lot in terms of how much direction they give…and there’s tons of room for interpretation, or so is my understanding. I’m no expert on classical music or anything, but I think comparing it to formulaic plots is confused. The live individual performance in classical music is really important….

You’re not talking about the same thing: I was referring to the way the same Mozart piece is performed again and again vs. the plot of Road Runner being performed again and again … not the difference between Cage (whose pieces often do sound different each time because of chance being part of their construction).

If you have 2 competent performers, then you’re going to easily recognize Mozart’s melody. You can have 2 competent film crews, but the same script isn’t going to look or feel the same.

Noah: “Domingos, I was wondering if you’d find jazz too lowbrow! That’s kind of awesome; it’s been…what, 80 years since people could sneer at jazz for being too pop?

Is there any pop music at all that you like? Or strictly classical?”

Oh, I know that. I even like Wayne Horvitz. It’s true that I’m not a big fan of jazz music, but Steven may be more on the money than myself. I was just responding to what you said. The thing with pop is that it is just one musical idea repeated again and again while great music has, what?, thousands of ideas organized in real complicated structures? Pop is mostly melody, but I prefer harmony… and deep meaning (I’m a big fan of 17th century religious music, for instance).

I’m saying this, but I really know next to nothing about music. Besides, I have no musical hear at all.

As for the pop I like, the farthest that I can go is Italian singer and composer Paolo Conte.

Charles: I accept cartoon violence a lot easier than entertainment violence of the action movie kind (mainly because it usually has hidden or not so hidden connexions to the real world). Condemning the violence in the Road Runner is… huh… a bit far-fetched to say the least…